--- title: 100 Greatest Popular Songs: TIME List of Best Music description: Breaking news and analysis from time.com. Politics, world news, photos, video, tech reviews, health, science, and entertainment news. canonical: https://time.com/archive/7125391/the-all-time-100-songs/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2011-10-24T09:00:29.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-06-10T12:34:30.754Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: TIME Picks the All-TIME 100 Songs og:description: Our critics pick the most extraordinary English-language pop recordings of the past 88 years -- songs that thrill us every time we hear them og:url: https://time.com/archive/7125391/the-all-time-100-songs/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: TIME Picks the All-TIME 100 Songs twitter:description: Our critics pick the most extraordinary English-language pop recordings of the past 88 years -- songs that thrill us every time we hear them twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # All-TIME 100 Songs > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Oct 24, 2011 9:00 AM UTC by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Oct 24, 2011 9:00 AM UTC ## 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' 
The lyrics to "Subterranean Homesick Blues" don't make much sense. A "man in a coonskin cap in a big pen"? A "girl by the whirlpool"? What is Bob Dylan talking about? And yet, on this opening track to 1965's Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan weaves these disconnected images together to form a rollicking, rambling two-and-a-half-minute song that perfectly describes the frantic urban life that so many disillusioned young people were experiencing in the mid-1960s. Dylan had written a number of chart-topping songs before "Subterranean," but the hit versions were always sung by other artists. (Peter, Paul and Mary's 1963 "Blowin' in the Wind," for example, reached No. 2 on Billboard's pop chart. Dylan's did not.) "Subterranean" was the first song performed by Dylan to make it to the Billboard Top 40\. His rushed, spoken-word delivery is, in some ways, an early form of rap. And the cue-card-tossing introduction to D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back — in which Dylan flashes bits of the song's lyrics while Allen Ginsberg skulks around behind him — is essentially an early form of the music video. That's a lot of historical firsts for a song that lasts less than three minutes.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | micahernst ## 'Jailhouse Rock' 
Elvis Presley had already recorded some of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's hits (does the breakout cut "Hound Dog" ring a bell?), but "Jailhouse Rock" was the first song the duo wrote especially for him. Or more accurately, for the movie of the same name, in which Presley was set to star. From that ominous guitar riff to the lyrics' sly homosexual innuendo ("No. 47 said to No. 3, 'You the cutest jailbird I ever did see' "), "Jailhouse Rock" charted new territory in popular music. In the film, Presley performs the song while dancing; choreographer Alex Romero took the rock star's signature hip swivel and worked it into a routine that rivals even the most outlandish of contemporary pop music's theatrics. | krooney ## 'Folsom Prison Blues' 
"I shot a man in Reno/ Just to watch him die." That single lyric might be the most powerful line Johnny Cash ever wrote, and it's the heart of "Folsom Prison Blues," a song about a jailed man's lament over his murderous actions. "Folsom Prison Blues" took on even more prominence when he performed the song at that very prison in 1968\. Cash later explained that the words represented the worst reason he could think of for murder. Cash's vocals plunge to deep, dark spaces as he sings of men envisioning a life outside their jail cells and becoming jealous of fat cats smoking big cigars. It's an upbeat song of grief, but as Cash continued to play it over the years, the song (and Cash) got rowdier and the pace got quicker, pushed ever forward by a catchy, plucky guitar solo. Somehow, the Man in Black was able to combine deep lyrical depression with an exciting, driving musical accompaniment. | krooney ## 'My Mammy' 
Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis covered his songs, Bob Dylan and Jerry Lee Lewis revered him, and every belter from Judy Garland to Mick Jagger to Taylor Hicks owes lessons in showmanship to Al Jolson. He might be remembered today as a shameless schmaltz peddler, his face corked in the demeaning racial stereotype of blackface, but in his day, this son of a Lithuanian rabbi was billed as “the World’s Greatest Entertainer.” He was surely the most seismic singer of his era: a star of Broadway, records and the earliest talking pictures. Onstage, prowling runways that projected him into the audience, he would build a tune to operatic grandeur, then tear it apart with a sobbing coda.



Like Elvis’ “Hound Dog,” Jolson’s signature song was a cover: “My Mammy” was introduced on the vaudeville stage by William Frawley, later I Love Lucy’s Fred Mertz. With lyrics by Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis and music by Walter Donaldson (a prolific hitmaker whose other “my” songs included “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” and “My Blue Heaven”), this maternal torch song proclaims, “I’d walk a million miles for one of your smiles.” Jolson nuked that naked sentiment in the climactic moments of The Jazz Singer, the 1927 musical melodrama that cued Hollywood’s gold rush to talkies. As a cantor’s son who has deserted the family job for showbiz, he sings to his mother in the front row — shimmying, patting his heart, impulsively clapping gloved hands, kneeling to speak-sing the second chorus and pleading, “Doncha know me? It’s your little baby!” In a galvanic performance, Jolson sold more than the song; he proved that the new medium could capture the glory of the world’s greatest entertainer and all those who would follow. | timeadmin ## 'St. Louis Blues' 
The songwriter who popularized the blues form, W.C. Handy, published "St. Louis Blues" in 1914\. It's a slinky, haunting piece with a middle section that shifts into a tango rhythm, and most of the people who heard Bessie Smith's recording in 1925 would have recognized it as a standard. They'd also have recognized Smith as an enormous star: "the Empress of the Blues." But nobody was ready for her rendition, which stripped the song down to a raw, boastful, desperate performance, a chilling series of harmonium drones (played by Fred Longshaw) and painterly cornet flourishes by then up-and-coming jazz musician Louis Armstrong. Smith wields every phrase of the song like a butterfly knife, and who she cuts with it shifts from line to line — herself, the man who betrayed her, the "St. Louis Woman" whose arms he's in now and the world to which she wants to make it absolutely clear what has happened. | timeadmin ## 'Ol’ Man River' 
The first great Broadway drama to integrate its story with its music, Show Boat spawned a steamboat full of hits, including "Make Believe," "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" and "Why Do I Love You?" But its enduring anthem was this plaint, sung by a former slave, about the mindless ol' Mississippi River. Jerome Kern, who practically invented the 20th century pop ballad, provided the churning, majestic melody to Oscar Hammerstein II's lyrics. Hammerstein, whose later Broadway collaboration with Richard Rodgers would produce America's midcentury secular liturgy in hymns like "You'll Never Walk Alone," often said, "I can't write a song without hope in it." "Ol' Man River" gave the lie to that statement. Essentially the prison dirge of a people whose only crime was their skin color, it turned the Mississippi into a metaphor for the white man's indifference: "What does he care if the world's got troubles?/ What does he care if the land ain't free?"



Jules Bledsoe introduced "Ol' Man River," but in a 1929 Broadway revival and in James Whale's definitive 1936 film version, the song found its ideal singer: Paul Robeson, a Rutgers football star and Columbia-educated lawyer whose charismatic presence would have propelled him to the top of any entertainment medium not hobbled by racism. In Robeson's powerful bass-baritone voice you can hear not just mourning for the black underclass but also a brilliant man's anger at being deprived of his fair measure of roles. In the '50s, blacklisted for his Communist Party membership — and for being so damned uppity — Robeson would alter the words of Hammerstein's final verse from the despairing "Ah gits weary/ an' sick of tryin'/ Ah'm tired of livin'/ an' scared of dyin' " to the defiant, hopeful "But I keeps laffin'/ instead of cryin'/ I must keep fightin'/ until I'm dyin.' " | timeadmin ## 'I Got Rhythm' 
Jazz took barely a decade to get from the South to Broadway, where composers like Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Ray Henderson and especially George Gershwin jumped on the beat and gave it an elegant snazz. The complex syncopation of Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" was sold by his brother Ira's vivacious, seemingly simple lyrics: "I got rhythm/ I got music/ I got my man/ Who could ask for anything more?" In an era of meticulous musical craftsmanship, Ira not only chose the slangy "I got" over "I've got" but dared to write a chorus that contained no rhymes.



Part of an immortal score ("But Not for Me," "Bidin' My Time" and "Embraceable You") for the 1930 show Girl Crazy, "I Got Rhythm" was introduced by the 21-year-old Ethel Merman, who would serve as a sassy muse for Cole Porter (Anything Goes), Berlin (Annie Get Your Gun) and Jule Styne–Stephen Sondheim (Gypsy). With a clarion contralto that could shatter glass and shoo away the blues, Merman made the number a get-happy alternative to the fatalistic "Ol' Man River" and a perky spirit rouser in the first year of the Great Depression. The song's bridge (which does rhyme) both acknowledged the dour national mood and tried to exorcise it: "Old man trouble/ I don't mind him/ You won't find him/ round my door." | timeadmin ## 'This Land Is Your Land' 
If Woody Guthrie had been alive during the founding of the U.S., "This Land Is Your Land" would probably be our national anthem. The song, just Guthrie, a guitar and a melody that already existed, doesn't seem like much when you first hear it. But Guthrie's idealistic vision of the U.S. is a call to our nation's founding principles of equality and democracy. And in the 1930s and '40s, Guthrie's squeaky Okie twang spoke for a generation of struggling Americans. Somehow "This Land Is Your Land" encompasses the American Dream with just three simple chords and a childlike lyrical quality. There's nothing overly ambitious about it, yet Guthrie paints a sweeping panorama of the U.S. — from California to New York, from ocean to desert — a country founded on principles we often fail to live up to. | timeadmin ## 'Rivers of Babylon' 
There were dozens of groups like the Melodians in Jamaica in the late '60s — vocal trios that could harmonize sweetly or testify roughly, and came up through the rock-steady scene that evolved into reggae as we know it, singing love songs over off-beat rhythms. What they came up with after joining forces with Chinese-Jamaican producer Leslie Kong, though, was something different: a slinky, funky, political sing-along that's also a hymn in disguise.



The song is inspired by the Book of Psalms, one lyric being about homesick slaves longing for revenge, another about hoping for divine approval of the singer's art. The crucial tweak the Melodians made was changing the the line usually rendered as "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" to "King Alpha's song." That's a Rastafarian turn of phrase: King Alpha is a reference to Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie. This is a modern song of exile and a plea for deliverance aimed equally at heaven and the dance floor.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' 
Released just a month before lead singer Ian Curtis’ suicide in May 1980, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is the Joy Division song you’ve heard even if you’ve never heard of Joy Division. (Its recognition factor is largely due to its promiscuous afterlife; most memorably, it lands like a shimmering exclamation point late in the haunting teen dreamscape Donnie Darko.) The song is coiled and propulsive, like so much of the classic postpunk that tore out of the northern climes of late-’70s England, and it’s shot through with a heart-swelling synth refrain. (This dynamic is the flip side of “Blue Monday” by New Order, the band that rose out of the ashes of Joy Division.) The linchpin is Curtis’ doomy baritone, mourning a withered relationship with the sad gusto of an undead cabaret singer. This song is the great canticle of the universal mopey teen. What makes it greater is that the mopey teen can grow up and find it just as useful.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Nothing Compares 2 U' 
This haunting worldwide hit from Sinéad O'Connor's 1990 album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got is a case of right song, right singer, right time. The song: music and lyrics by Prince, recorded by a sideline band of his, then exiled to the back catalog. The singer: a tough but tender Dublin girl with doe's eyes and a shaved head, looking for a break. The time: a pop scene that had recently begun making room on the charts for not-your-average-mainstream female singer-songwriters like Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman. There's a fair amount of late-'80s overproducing to get past in this track, but O'Connor's ethereal voice is more than a match for it — the proof being that when she takes it down to almost a whisper, the breakup anguish emerges most clearly. Her full-throated embrace of the song's emotion and the single tear she sheds during the video catapulted her to a Grammy and to fame.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\]

| timeadmin ## 'Get Ur Freak On' 
Built on a mantra-like three-note riff played on a tumbi and Elliott’s breathless but authoritative rhymes (embellished with tickling percussion, feathery ululating and faux-theremin shivers out of a B-horror movie), “Get Ur Freak On,” co-written by Elliott and Timbaland, is a multilayered yet minimalist triumph of hybrid vigor—a laboratory-grade splice of Swing Mob, bhangra and the theme from Halloween. No one captured the polycultural pow of the song better than Greg Tate in an instant-classic Village Voice review of Miss E ... So Addictive. “What Missy and Tim have done with ‘Freak On’ is push the Nawleans thing into Basement Bhangra territory,” Tate wrote. “The fusion of pneumatic electrofunk with breaker-wave tablas and Qawwali pursuit of higher falsetto ground is done as seamlessly and nongratuitously as you'll hear this side of Miles Davis’ On the Corner.”



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\]

| timeadmin ## 'Tightrope' 
With her topiary quiff, snug tuxedo, gospel-diva pipes and slip-sliding snake-dance moves, Janelle Monáe is a genetic meld of early James Brown, Jackson 5–era MJ and Annie Lennox at her most glossily robo-androgynous, and her television debut, on Late Show with David Letterman on May 18, 2010, heralded the birth of a star. The song she performed that night was “Tightrope,” a jaunty ode to equanimity in the soul-funk spirit of the Dap-Kings, backers of Sharon Jones and the late Amy Winehouse — except that, unlike those retro-cool front women, Monáe seems derivative of everyone and no one at once. She’s an impish, impeccably tailored cyborg, an emissary from days of future past, yet an entirely new species. Even if her concept album The ArchAndroid didn’t catch the fire that its irresistible lead single set, the 26-year-old Monáe remains one of the most promising talents of a still-young century, and this song is the evidence. “We call that classy brass,” indeed.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\]

| timeadmin ## 'Wildwood Flower' 
They were known as the first family of country music. The harmonies and guitar playing of Alvin Pleasant ("A.P.") Carter, his wife Sara and her cousin Maybelle would dictate the sound of country and bluegrass music for each genre's first decades. The Virginia-born trio made a career out of taking old folk and mountain songs and tweaking them with their own Appalachian spin. Which is what they did with "Wildwood Flower."



Originally written in the 1860s, it's a simple song: a young woman is suddenly deserted by her beau. Recorded in May 1928 on Maybelle's 19th birthday, the Carter-family version forever inscribes the song's 12- (or so) note guitar part into the mind of anyone who hears it. And whether it's sung by Sara or Maybelle, who both flatten their vowels as memorably as Nelly would 74 years later ("hair" becomes "herr," and "flower" becomes "flarr"), the song maintains its sense of young innocence lost. That "pale wildwood flower" has been jilted for the first time and she won't forget it for as long as she lives. The bloom is definitely off the rose. | timeadmin ## 'Strange Fruit' 
"Strange Fruit" is a tragic song famously performed by Billie Holiday, one of America's most tragic singers. The devastating image of "strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees" is the mournful heart of this antiracism song. Named song of the century by TIME in 1999, the lyrics were written by Abel Meeropol, an English teacher from the Bronx who in 1937 ran across a photograph of a lynching that both disturbed and inspired him. The resulting poem became the basis of the song two years later. Holiday's live version of "Strange Fruit," with only a piano backing her, is even more raw and heartfelt than the recording. You can feel her anguish, you can feel her sadness, you can feel her anger. It's a song that is complicated in a unique way — such beautiful humanity in such a shameful topic. | timeadmin ## 'How High the Moon' 
With five Top 10 hits during a nine-month stretch in 1950–51, and another five in 1952–53, guitarist Les Paul and his singing wife Mary Ford provided pretty, perky renditions of classic pop tunes in the somnolent period just before rock 'n' roll shook everything up. And though their records ceased to climb the charts after 1955, Paul's guitar innovations would influence rock for decades. He pioneered recording on tape, devised the first eight-track tape-recording system, designed one of the first synthesizers and invented the Gibson Les Paul guitar — and made it sing like a hipster chorus. "That big, fat, round, ballsy sound with the bright high end is the Les Paul sound," the master later said. "Nobody else has it." But everybody stole it. "We used to start our gigs with the opening riffs from 'How High the Moon,' " said another Paul, the one with the Beatles. "Everybody was trying to be a Les Paul clone in those days."



When Alfred Drake and Frances Comstock first performed the Nancy Hamilton–Morgan Lewis number in the 1940 Broadway revue Two for the Show, "How High the Moon" was a slow fox-trot, a song of longing where the moon is just a distant prop for melancholy. Paul sped it up to 2/4 time and merged 21 separate tracks to create a bubbly blast of pop immortality. He opens with a descending chord pattern that Bill Haley would appropriate for the end of "Rock Around the Clock," his guitar solo features a lot of the power chords that later rockers would borrow, and Ford's menthol-smooth voice sometimes teases the lyrics, sometimes caresses them. If the lyrics are wistful, the record's mood is all cool verve — a mini-masterpiece in two minutes and four seconds. | timeadmin ## 'It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels' 
The greatest answer song ever recorded ended up eclipsing its source and opening up its genre. Earlier in 1952, Hank Thompson's "The Wild Side of Life" had been an enormous country hit that chastised a "honky tonk angel" for giving up her chances of domesticity and hanging out in "the places where the wine and liquor flow." There wasn't much of a market for country records by women at the time, but the little-known Kitty Wells was commissioned to sing a response that set Thompson straight: "Too many times married men think they're still single."



Wells torched it. Her performance stays well within the strict parameters demanded by the likes of the Grand Ole Opry, but you can feel her frustration and resentment bubbling over the edges of the song. (The Opry, in fact, briefly banned it on the grounds of suggestiveness.) "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" lit a fire under Wells' career; even more important, it single-handedly carved out a space for women's voices — and frustrations — in country music. | timeadmin ## 'Take This Hammer' 
Rosa Parks was her No. 1 fan, and Martin Luther King Jr. called her the queen of American folk music. Odetta Holmes' stage presence was regal enough: planted onstage like an oak tree no one would dare cut down, wearing a guitar high on her chest, she could suffuse Carnegie Hall with her powerful contralto as other vocalists might fill a phone booth. She used that amazing instrument to bear witness to the pain and perseverance of her ancestors. Some folks sing songs. Odetta testified.



Schooled in opera from age 13, Odetta toured in the musical Finian's Rainbow before going solo in nightclubs and recording definitively scalding renditions of black folk songs in her 1956 Tradition LP Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues. Her second album, the 1957 Odetta Live at the Gate of Horn, climaxes with "Take This Hammer," a prison work song recorded by Leadbelly in 1942\. Whacking her guitar more than strumming it, she digs into the despair of a chain-gang convict and extracts sonic gold: a shout, a sob, a desperate prayer. Here are audible wounds transformed into art, from a voice whose sonic and emotive power could raise the dead and reach the deaf. | jb1271 ## 'Tutti Frutti' 
"Wop bop-a-loo-mom a-lomp bomp bomp!" If Martians had landed on Earth and conquered it with rock 'n roll, this could have been their war cry. The opening phrase of Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" announced that early rock would be both primal and foreign, earthy and unearthly. Kids scrambled to decipher the meaning of the sounds emitted by the pompadoured piano dervish. "Tutti frutti, all rooty"? "All rooty," they determined, was a variation of "all right" from Cab Calloway's 1941 "Are You All Reet?" (which includes the line, "I'm like the tree/ I'm all root"). One thing for sure, "Tutti Frutti" has nothing to do with the ice-cream-and-chopped fruits dessert; the song is a sexual anthem in Richard's unique language: raving, speaking-in-tongues, R&B Esperanto.



Of the three great black pianist-singers of early rock, Fats Domino was round and crooning, Ray Charles was a nightclub smoothie let loose after hours, and Little Richard Penniman, from Macon, Ga., was the raw goods. His original lyrics for his first hit were just a little raunchy — "Tutti frutti, loose booty! / If it don't fit, don't force it! / You can grease it, make it easy" — so Dorothy La Bostrie was called in to sanitize them; she gave Richard a gal named Sue ("She knows just what to do") and another named Daisy ("She almost drive me crazy"). But really, the words weren't nearly as important as the remorselessly frenetic beat, the propulsive piano work and the primal, screaming vocal. Richard maintained this astonishing verve for two years, with "Long Tall Sally," "Slippin' and Slidin'," "Good Golly, Miss Molly" and other orgasmic declarations. His wailing falsetto ("Oooh!") would be appropriated by the Beatles, who were his opening act on a 1963 European tour. He also toured with the Rolling Stones, and on some 1964 tracks he used the young Jimi Hendrix as a sideman. Said Hendrix: "I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice." | jb1271 ## 'That'll Be the Day' 
It took 2 min. 16 sec. for Buddy Holly to alter the course of rock 'n' roll. "That'll Be the Day" was released in May 1957 on Coral Records and credited to Holly's backup band the Crickets for various legal reasons. It shot to the top of the charts in the U.S. and U.K. and into the ears of two teenagers, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. "I remember hearing 'That'll Be the Day' and the lyric 'That'll be the day-hey-hey when I die,' " McCartney reminisced in a 2007 New Yorker article. "Die? In a pop song? That was dark, man. We loved that."



Holly bled country music into rock 'n' roll, making his voice hiccup where others would insert a twang. He drew his syllables out wildly — "That'll be the day when you make me cry-y-y" — and played his Gibson guitar with a ferocity that few have been able to match. With that one song, Holly proved that rockin' music could take even a skinny, geeky boy with glasses and make him sound cool. | jb1271 ## 'Johnny B. Goode' 
Start with what is often cited as the zazziest opening in rock history: a guitar's siren call to get up and dance. The irresistible impact of that intro tells you that Chuck Berry's bio-tune about a country boy (originally "colored boy") who "played a guitar like a ringin' a bell" is the singer's own story — sanitized for playing on American Bandstand, since it leaves out Berry's serial brushes with the law. Blending blues and country influences in his vocal and instrumental intonations, he was rock's most persuasive black ambassador to the white kids who were just getting into that miscegenated musical form. For them, he wrote upbeat numbers about teen angst ("School Days") and cute vixens ("Sweet Little Sixteen"), and duckwalked across the stage with a born showman's satanic majesty. Keith Richards, on the night he introduced Berry for his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame laurel, said, "It's hard for me to induct Chuck Berry, because I lifted every lick he ever played."



The pure-'50s rave-up "Johnny B. Goode" has antecedents from the previous decade. The structure of the lyrics channels the Andrews Sisters' "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy"; and the famous intro is lifted from the opening (played by trumpets) of Louis Jordan's 1946 hit "Ain't That Just like a Woman." But the wit of both the song and its playing are uniquely Berry. Unlike the savage thrumming of later rock guitarists, Berry's virtuosity wore a smile. That good-natured energy is what gave the song its imperishable life. It's why, when Back to the Future's Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) needs to wake up the sleepy small-town citizens of 1955, he chooses "Johnny B. Goode." Berry was everything ferocious and joyous about proto-rock. "If you tried to give rock 'n' roll another name," John Lennon said, "you might call it 'Chuck Berry.' " | jb1271 ## 'What'd I Say' 
His nickname was "the Genius," and singer-keyboardist Ray Charles earned it, reinventing his career again and again over the course of more than half a century. He hit the top of the R&B chart in the '50s, the pop chart in the '60s, the country chart in the '80s and the dance chart in the '90s, and won eight Grammys for his posthumous final album in 2004.



"What'd I Say" wasn't written the way most songs are written — it started as a couple of riffs Charles and his band started vamping on at the end of a long gig, and when the audience went wild, they kept going. On the recording, the song really takes off in its second half, when Charles exchanges a series of blatantly sexual moans and gasps with his backup singers, the Raelettes. Their interplay came straight out of gospel's call-and-response tradition, but it transformed the sound of Sunday morning to the sound of Saturday night. | jb1271 ## 'God Only Knows' 
By 1966, Brian Wilson was pushing the rest of the Beach Boys into uncharted, experimental waters (spurred on by the Beatles' own experimentation on Rubber Soul). Besides "Good Vibrations," "God Only Knows" is the most complex piece of music the Beach Boys ever recorded. It has an unusual chord progression (along with a baroque staccato bridge) that's masked in a musical tapestry that often sounds like one instrument instead of a unique combination of French horn, flute, harpsichord and strings. But it's all held together by Wilson's untroubled melody (sung, actually, by brother Carl). Though the Beach Boys were floating further and further away from their "Surfin U.S.A." days by the time Pet Sounds was released, the weave of vocals in the middle and end of the song recall the simpler doo-wop tunes of their earlier years.



"God Only Knows" was one of the first pop songs to mention God so prominently, something the group was concerned about because they thought the song would be considered overtly religious and get less airplay. (Wilson also reportedly hated the first line, "I may not always love you.") But in the end, none of that mattered. "God Only Knows" is an absolute masterpiece and one of the defining love songs of the 1960s.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Thunder Road' 
Bruce Springsteen took months to craft the opening track to Born to Run, perhaps his and the E Street Band's finest album. For several years prior, Springsteen had struggled for recognition. Finally, in August 1975 after a memorable five-night, 10-show stand in New York City, he and the band achieved national and critical acclaim. Weeks later, they released Born to Run. The melancholic opening of "Thunder Road," with its lonely harmonica, offers its own invitation to listeners as they begin the album. As Springsteen sings of taking his Mary to the promised land ("You ain't a beauty, but hey, you're all right"), the song builds and gains momentum until the Boss is screaming, yelling, somehow — through his signature raspyness — remaining on key. Meanwhile, the E Street Band's wall of sound — Springsteen's talking guitar; the excitable, majestic piano; the high-pitched bells over the top throughout — encapsulated the music that the band would perfect throughout the 1970s and into the '80s.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'I've Got You Under My Skin' 
There are so many Sinatras to choose from. But somewhere between Frankie Boy and Old Blue Eyes, between the anemic heartthrob of '40s bobbysoxers ("Swoonatra" preceded Beatlemania by two decades) and the swaggering Chairman of the Board, between the tremulous tenor of his youth and the elder-statesman baritone that talked numbers as much as singing them, the essential Sinatra can be found. It's in this rendition of Cole Porter's song about love as a malady that is part dermatological condition, part addiction. "I said to myself this affair never will go so well. / But why should I try to resist when, darling, I know so well / I've got you under my skin?" The melancholy cosmopolitan wrote this in 1936, and every pop thrush and jazzman covered it, but Sinatra's 1956 version, on the Songs for Swingin' Lovers LP, is so definitive that Francis Albert may as well own the copyright.



For Porter's long lines of longing, Sinatra's long notes. As a young singer impressed by Tommy Dorsey's ability on trombone, and by Jascha Heifetz's on violin, to extend a musical phrase to eight or 16 bars, Sinatra built up his breath control by running laps and swimming underwater. As influenced as he was by Bing Crosby's intimate crooning, Frank painted the same ballads in darker, more mature shadings and with more assaultive, big-band tones. His initial approach to "I've Got You" is that of a man pleased with his ardor; but in the bridge, when "a warning voice" (his own) tells him to "wake up to reality," the addict's helplessness kicks in. The great Nelson Riddle arrangement, influenced by Ravel's "Bolero," fully explores Porter's theme of irresistible sexual compulsion — an impulse driven home by slide trombonist Milt Bernard's besotted solo. Sinatra returns with a more defiant reading of the bridge, and by the end, he's whispering the title line as an endearment to the woman who controls him. That could leave the listener thinking this is a love song, when it's really a declaration, from one of American culture's dominant personalities, that a crucial part of any affair is surrender. | timeadmin ## 'Heroes' 
During his three-album sojourn with Brian Eno in ’70s West Berlin, Bowie drew from Krautrock, ambient, African and minimalist influences. One of his best-known songs from this era is a timeless contradiction in terms: an experimental anthem. The sound of “Heroes” is shallow, lo-fi, trebly, shuddering with reverb; Bowie shriek-sings about star-crossed lovers at the Berlin Wall as if from inside a KGB holding cell or perhaps the world’s largest clothes dryer, and his gallant resolve surges and dips (“We’re nothing / And nothing will help us / Maybe we’re lying”). But all doubts are vaporized by the laser-beam distortion of the main riff, bearing aloft the song’s dangerous romance and its call to arms: “We can be heroes!” When U2 went to Berlin to make Achtung Baby, they were trying to make this song. The entire Arcade Fire catalog came out of this song.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Blue Monday' 
New Order's roots were in punk rock: three-quarters of the band had been in Joy Division. In the early '80s, though, they started to explore the innovations of dance music, and especially the potential contrast between "expressive" instruments (Bernard Sumner's uncertain, cracking voice; Peter Hook's twanging bass guitar) and "inexpressive" instruments (the perfectly even pulse of the cracking drum machine and synthesized disco bass octaves on “Blue Monday”). Well over seven minutes long and released as a 12-inch single — the medium of club music, not of rock, at that point — "Blue Monday" remains mysterious in just about every way. It's a sad, haunting party record. Its half-unrhymed lyrics keep shifting their subject and briefly dissolve altogether during the final verse. It shares its title, which appears nowhere in the song, with an unrelated 1956 Fats Domino hit. The new-wave music of the '80s treated digital technology as a symbol of bodiless perfectionism, but "Blue Monday" used it less to anticipate a shiny future than to open a wormhole into the unknown.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Being Boring' 
Neil Tennant has said (half-jokingly?) that this dance ballad was the duo’s attempt to mimic Stock Aitken Waterman, the writing team behind the peppy ’80s synth pop of Rick Astley, Kylie Minogue and Bananarama. That striving toward a hi-NRG higher ground, ingeniously paired with big harp flourishes and wah-wah guitar, may lend “Being Boring” some of its magic — creating a buoyant counterpoint (and complement) to its themes of loss, sorrow and memory. Written for a friend of Tennant’s who died of AIDS, the song has a classic three-act structure (’20s-inspired teen parties in northern England, starry-eyed arrival in ’70s London, backward glances at the turn of the ’90s), an air of wistful carpe diem (“I bolted through a closing door”) and a last verse that always catches in the throat: “I never dreamt that I would get to be/ The creature that I always meant to be/ But I thought in spite of dreams/ You’d be sitting somewhere here with me.”



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| timeadmin ## '1952 Vincent Black Lightning' 
Rolling Stone called him "the greatest guitarist in British folk rock" — a genre he helped invent with the founding of Fairport Convention in 1967, when he was 18\. He went on to sing duets of chillingly harmonic beauty with his now ex-wife, Linda Thompson. But Richard Thompson's solo tune "1952 Vincent" wins the prize for fusing his sound and storytelling into a glorious example of what one guy can accomplish with just a guitar, a voice, an imagination and a set of astonishingly nimble fingers. A ballad about a ne'er-do-well teen with a fetish for fast bikes and redheaded, leather-clad girls, "1952 Vincent" takes you to the emotional edge of love and theft, then soars right over it. Why a Vincent Black Lightning? It's a specialty English motorcycle — fewer than 30 were made in 1952 — which makes it "an object of myth," Thompson said in an interview, "a rather wonderful, rare and beautiful beast." It's fitting, then, that the song he wrote about it has become an object of cult adoration.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\]

| timeadmin ## 'C.R.E.A.M.' 
The Wu-Tang Clan's improbable blend of kung-fu-movie mysticism and the paranoid apocalyptica of the Five Percent Nation gave them an unrivaled mystic appeal among teenage hip-hop fans. But the eschatology would have counted for naught if the WTC — inter alia Method Man, Raekwon and Ole Dirty Bastard — hadn't been brilliant rappers, and if their leader and producer, RZA, hadn't been a musical genius. That much is clear on C.R.E.A.M.,” off their legendary 1993 debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers): A moody string-and-piano sample from an obscure Charmels song loops like a nagging question. A pervasive sense of unease and gloom is an auteurial constant in RZA's work. And on “C.R.E.A.M.” it provides the score for a true-crime confessional. "Cash rules everything around me," the clansmen intone. If they weren't making it selling records, like the song says, they'd be selling drugs and "sticking up white boys in ball courts."



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\]

| timeadmin ## 'Scenario' 
A Tribe Called Quest makes music that ages slowly. The group experimented with jazz tunes back when most hip-hop acts hadn’t yet learned to genre-cross, which often prevented their music from becoming popular with mainstream audiences. (It took several years for their debut album, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm to go gold.) Tribe members Q-Tip and Phife Dawg spouted lyrics as much for their rhyming qualities as for the thoughts they expressed. And though Tribe did tackle weighty topics (date rape, materialism), they also put out a lot music that was just plain fun. “Scenario” falls into that second category. It seamlessly weaves together jazz, hip-hop and funk, and it’s so catchy that if you play it at a party, it’ll make even the most rhythmically challenged guest get up and dance. The highlight of the track is a breakout verse from the then unknown rapper named Busta Rhymes, who growls, “Rwar, rawr, rawr, like a dungeon dragon” as Miles Davis’ “So What” floats along in the background.



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| timeadmin ## 'Paranoid Android' 
“Paranoid Android” is more symphony than pop song. It’s intricately layered — at times all-out rock, at other times complete noise, at others a somber choir. The second track on 1997’s OK Computer, “Paranoid Android” is Radiohead at their most ambitious. Initially several separate songs, “Paranoid Android” was pieced together by the band à la the Beatles’ “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” (Toward the beginning if you listen closely, you can even hear a snippet of Thom Yorke’s “Fitter Happier” spoken word track in the background.) The song addresses a number of topics: consumerism, death, unborn chicken voices. And Yorke’s voice becomes another instrument, not just a vehicle for lyrics. But the song was almost put together as a bit of a joke, it being so epic at nearly seven minutes long that it was almost too adventurous. Even the climax of “Paranoid Android” is essentially an anticlimax: the druid-like vocal section toward the end as Thom Yorke smoothly sings “Rain down/ rain down/ on me” until the rest of the band returns with sheer guitar and electronica noise. Almost 15 years later, it’s still a song that sounds like nothing that’s come before or since.



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| timeadmin ## 'Georgia… Bush' 
A good protest song doesn’t generalize. It doesn’t pull punches. Its message is usually political and always controversial. It might not change your mind, but it will force you to recognize that there are people out there—thousands, maybe millions—who feel the way its singer does. Lil Wayne’s scathing critique of George W. Bush and the federal government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina rivals any anti-Vietnam song from the 1960s. “The white people smiling like everything’s cool,” he raps, “but I know people who died in that pool. I know people who died in them schools.” On the song, which appeared on his free Dedication 2 mix tape, he speaks for all the victims of Hurricane Katrina who felt that their country let them down. “So what happened to the levees? Why wasn’t they steady? Why wasn’t they able to control this?” We don’t know, Lil Wayne. We just don’t know.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\]

| timeadmin ## 'White Christmas' 
Performed for the first time by Bing Crosby on a Christmas Eve radio program in 1941 (just 17 days after the attack on Pearl Harbor) and released the following year on an album of songs from the film Holiday Inn, "White Christmas" was played repeatedly on Armed Forces Radio during World War II. It resonated with thousands of homesick American service members in snowless South Pacific climates. In just 54 words, Irving Berlin captured what it feels like to be far from home during the holidays. The song has no bridge; instead, Berlin travels up the scale during each verse and then immediately repeats it to enhance the feeling of longing. Glistening treetops evoke images of home, while the mention of Christmas cards reminds us of the ones we love.



"White Christmas" earned Berlin a 1943 Academy Award and went on to become the best-selling single of all time, according to Guinness World Records. It has been called Tin Pan Alley's swan song; one of the last true hits produced before rock 'n' roll took over the airwaves. These days, it's one of the most beloved parts of the secularized American Christmas tradition — right up there with Rudolph and A Christmas Carol.



(Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app) | timeadmin ## 'Move On Up a Little Higher' 
For decades, gospel music kept itself as isolated from the secular pop world as it could manage. The record that made Mahalia Jackson "the Queen of Gospel" was sacred music through and through, but pop by default — it sold millions of copies. The two-part single had a simple arrangement, just piano and organ (the instruments any church would have on hand) supporting the rolling roar of Jackson's voice. That's all it needed. The Rev. William Herbert Brewster's composition is practically a sermon in itself, a string of descriptions of Christian glory that hovers around a few crucial phrases in lieu of a refrain; Jackson's delivery has the rhythm of preaching and the force of a lightning storm. There was more to "Move On Up" than religion and music, though: its clear subtext concerns black Americans' gradual ascent to economic and social power. As Brewster put it, "There were things that were almost dangerous to say, but you could sing it." | timeadmin ## 'Cold, Cold Heart' 
Hank Williams' too-brief career set the bar for country music. He was a charismatic showman, and a gifted vocalist who could make his virtuosic singing sound like passionate, folksy speech—listen to the way his delivery on "Cold, Cold Heart" makes his split-second yodels sound like his voice is cracking from emotional pain. But what he could do better than anybody else was write lyrics that expressed complicated states of mind in simple, foursquare language ("now I know your heart is shackled to a memory"). "Cold, Cold Heart" was originally stuck on the B-side of a single, apparently on the grounds that shatteringly sad slow songs didn't sell. Nonetheless, it ended up being an enormous hit, and once pop singer Tony Bennett sold a pile of copies of his own version, other performers started noticing that Williams wasn't just a country star—his songs were powerful enough to translate into any idiom. | timeadmin ## 'Angel from Montgomery' 
John Prine songs are like Raymond Carver stories, with characters who show their souls in a single phrase and scenes that flash one after another like a family slide show, sepia-tinged with longing and regret. He's not always big on plot, and nothing much happens in "Angel from Montgomery." But the old woman who narrates this song has a clear voice and vision, and her words resonate with the way you might feel about your own life — like maybe it took a wrong turn and you got lonely, and maybe you'd like some help just to get you to the end of the day. Bonnie Raitt's rich, raw cover made the song famous and didn't hurt her career either; in 2000 she told Performing Songwriter magazine, "I think 'Angel from Montgomery' probably meant more to my fans and my body of work than any other song." That's because she inhabits it so well, but also because, thanks to Prine's spare, poignant lyrics, we all can.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Zombie' 
The Nigerian bandleader Fela Anikulapo Kuti was the most galvanizing African musician of the 20th century: a larger-than-life personality who picked up on James Brown's innovations and ran with them until he turned them into a new kind of music. Afrobeat, the style he invented (with the help of his massive group, Afrika 70), was a party with a bomb as its centerpiece. Its songs, thickly layered with percussion and horns, could keep a dance floor shaking for 10 or 20 or 40 minutes at a time, but its lyrics were often explicitly political screeds or satires.



Like most of Fela's songs, "Zombie" was written in pidgin English, for the widest possible comprehensibility. It was an attack on Nigerian military members, mocking them as brainless killers ("Zombie no go think unless you tell am to think"). It was potent enough that they counterattacked with weapons rather than instruments, invading and destroying the Kalakuta Republic, the communal compound in Lagos where Fela lived and worked.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Bohemian Rhapsody' 
Thanks to its appearance in 1992's Wayne's World, it can be hard to take "Bohemian Rhapsody" seriously. But Queen's six-minute song is a true work of art. It's as if Freddie Mercury threw a bunch of music styles (a cappella ballad, hard-rock anthem and opera) into a blender and somehow, instead of coming up with musical mush, whipped up an exquisite dessert. When it came out, "Bohemian Rhapsody" soared to the top of the U.K. charts. (in the U.S. it stalled at No. 9). Critics, however, didn't know what to make of the sound. The New York Times called the song "all flash and calculation," while TIME thought the band "campy". Yes, Mercury did often wear a satin cape. But he also possessed one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking voices in rock 'n' roll.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\]

| timeadmin ## 'I Feel Love' 
There are fewer than 20 different words in "I Feel Love," and that's counting ooh. But this landmark disco record isn't about getting language across. It's a luxurious immersion in layer upon layer of Donna Summer's feathery soprano and producer Giorgio Moroder's fluttering, pattering synthesizers, a cathedral built out of identical 2-by-4s. Moroder's stroke of genius was realizing that the relentless pulse of disco had a lot in common with both experimental electronic music and the dreamy, tranced-out rhythms that had been coming out of German rock. He constructed an all-electronic backing track that barely changed and flickered like a strobe light, bodiless and weightless in contrast to the rapturous eroticism of Summer's performance. The original single is over in less than six minutes. The disco disc is closer to eight minutes, and its remix is more like 15\. The song could go on forever and never seem too long.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Stayin' Alive' 
By the time the Gibb brothers appeared on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, they had been putting out music for a decade. But it speaks to the hugeness of their songs here that they are forever associated with the movie and with disco in general. A tune about powering through life in a city (specifically New York), "Stayin' Alive" is an anthem to perseverance. It's there in the steady, repetitive beat, a looped drum snippet from "Night Fever." It's there in the "Ah, ha ha ha" chorus, which burrows relentlessly into your consciousness. It's there in the Gibb's falsettos, which reach the most mockable heights and then continue ever upward. You can tell by the way you change your walk when you listen to the song that it works on some subconscious level. You can't help it. You can't fight it. All of a sudden, you're not strolling. You're strutting. It's less a song than a cause. And you are the effect.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'I Wanna Be Sedated' 
The original New York punk rockers, the Ramones seemed to have everything: a look, a sound, an attitude, a killer sense of humor and an aesthetic that was so original that it shocked everyone who heard it and so simple that it has inspired 35 years' worth of copycats. What they didn't have was a hit to match their reputation, although a lot of their two-and-a-half-minute eruptions of adenoidal noise turned into standards anyway once the rest of the world caught up.



The Ramones' buzz-saw bubblegum was a spitball of opposition to nearly everything else happening in pop in the mid-'70s. "I Wanna Be Sedated" is an "I'm sick of being on the road" song that's hilarious where it could have been self-indulgent, mostly because nobody had ever sung so earnestly about longing for tranquilizers. And they were famously averse to rock-'n'-roll frippery like guitar solos, so Johnny Ramone's ultraminimalist solo here is both an upraised middle finger and a brilliant show of compositional chutzpah. | timeadmin ## 'Dreams' 
"Now here you go again, you say you want your freedom/ Well, who am I to keep you down?"



An appropriate sentiment for the hit single from what could be the most romantically fraught album of all time. You know the story. While recording Rumours, Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham were in the middle of one of their semiregular breakups. Husband-and-wife duo John and Christine McVie were well on their way to divorce. And through all that (or because of it, some might say), they managed to record one of the best-selling albums ever.



It's easy to brush aside Fleetwood Mac as simple masters of soft rock. But then you actually listen to the songs instead of remembering all the times you heard them on your local classic rock radio station, and you understand the band’s greatness. The best Fleetwood Mac songs are the most direct and unadorned. Take "Dreams." The steady, subtle drum and bass lines that open the song, the warbling guitar lines and Stevie Nicks' gorgeously weary voice: there's nothing about "Dreams" that doesn't work, nothing in it that doesn't belong. It's the song of a person who wakes up on a Sunday morning after a lovers’ quarrel, angry and sad and clear-eyed. Yes, "Dreams" is the height of soft rock. It's quiet and tempestuous and cuts straight to the heart.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Equal Rights' 
If Bob Marley was reggae's Martin Luther King, Peter Tosh was its Malcolm X. They were bandmates in the Wailers, of course, with Tosh penning many of the trio's best-loved tunes. But after the band broke up, the self-styled "Steppin' Razor" turned his melodic baritone, 400 years deep, to channeling the righteous rage of the urban ghetto — delivered on a cloud of ganja smoke (Legalize It had been his solo debut), over the lackadaisical bass and rhythm structure of classic roots reggae. While Bob was preaching love and unity, Peter was having none of it: "Everybody's crying out for peace," he intones on this iconic classic from 1977, "but none is crying out for justice." His message: "I don't want no peace/ I need equal rights and justice!" He lived to see neither: Tosh was shot dead by gunmen trying to rob him at his Jamaica home in 1987.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'One Nation Under a Groove' 
Chances are you were listening to George Clinton long before you knew you were listening to George Clinton. Samples borrowed from the complex, multilayered funk he has orchestrated over half a century provided the groove for countless hits by Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Public Enemy, the Notorious B.I.G. and dozens of other hip-hop acts. Even Prince sampled George Clinton. Funkadelic, like Parliament and P-Funk, was just one of the elastic rubrics under which Clinton convened the likes of Bernie Worrell and Bootsy Collins for a psychedelic rendering of the African-American musical experience, with homage to everyone from James Brown to Jimi Hendrix. "One Nation Under a Groove" marked a high point for Clinton, a chart-topping 1978 single cited by most cognoscenti on their lists of the most influential songs of all time. Its "Feet, don't fail me now!" refrain was apposite for a musician whose typical concert puts his audience through a four-hour workout. Don't even think about listening to it sitting down.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'He Stopped Loving Her Today' 
When George Jones recorded his greatest hit, he was a country veteran with 25 years of hits under his belt. He was also a walking train wreck, so strung out on booze and cocaine that he couldn't even manage a complete take of the song. ("Nobody will buy that morbid son of a bitch," Jones complained at the time.) Yet somehow, producer Billy Sherrill pieced together a performance that exemplified country music's unique power — its sentimentality, its appeal to maturity, its understanding of what it means to hope collectively in the face of hopelessness.



"He Stopped Loving Her Today" is absolutely shameless. (That spoken verse? Come on.) It's also utterly heartbreaking, an unforgettable portrait of doomed desire made all the more dramatic by Jones' understatement. The gigantic swoop of strings that Sherrill tacked onto the beginning of the final chorus may be the corniest thing ever put on record, but just try to listen to it without shivering.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Billie Jean' 
The song-set that made Michael Jackson the sensation of his generation, and the all-time best-selling album by far (110 million to runner AC/DC’s Back in Black’s 49 million), Thriller is a milestone in the history of pop music—and pop movies. With his seven videos off the nine-song album, Jackson crashed the informal color barrier of MTV, while validating the channel’s creed that music videos were not just marketing tools but potent cinematic statements. And the breakthrough came with a song, written by Jackson, that his producer Quincy Jones thought too weak to include. Supposedly based on a sad and absurd real-life incident in which a troubled woman accused Jackson of fathering one of her twins (“She says I am the one,/ But the kid is not my son”), “Billie Jean” is a denial of paternity—a celebrity’s cry of victimhood. To a funky riff in a minor key, the song tells female fans that a star like Jackson is both irresistible and untouchable. They are condemned to heartbreak, he to solitude.



The “Billie Jean” video, directed by Steve Barron, snapped the neck of everyone who saw it with its straight-on display of Jackson’s star quality. A sinister sleuth trails Michael with tabloid allegations, as the singer slouches poutily in his pink shirt and bowtie. Not until nearly two minutes into the video does he start dancing, and then it’s phenomenal. Any pavement flagstone, trash-can rim or back-alley stair his feet land on glows magically. The bed sheets he slips into turn phosphorescent. His moves are no less radiant: little miracles of spinning, strutting, hunching and moonwalking. The new medium had its ultimate showman, for Michael Jackson was not just the Al Jolson and Fred Astaire of music videos but his own beautiful, bad self.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | rcorliss ## 'Kiss' 
There are musicians with idiosyncratic visions. There are musicians who have the power to realize whatever visions they have. At the center of the Venn diagram, there's Prince, who at his peak single-handedly wrecked the curve of distinctiveness and giftedness. "Kiss" is a perfect dance track built out of negative space. It sounds minimal, razor-thin, barely sketched out — but its brilliant arrangement actually incorporates about a billion instruments (all of them in the treble range). Every sound is microcontrolled, beginning with the shifting tone of the opening guitar flourish and the orgasmic gasp and snare snap that lock it down. The most magnificent element, though, is Prince's vocal — a fantastically acrobatic falsetto come-on, punctuated with firecracker exclamations and climaxing with roof-raising shrieks. There had never been another record that sounded anything like "Kiss," and the highest compliment it can be paid is that 25 years later there still hasn't been one.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Master of Puppets' 
The title track to Metallica's 1986 album, "Master of Puppets" is one of the great drug songs. No, not a "drugs are so fun" song or a "let's listen to this while high" song, but rather one that reminds you of the downside to the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. I suspect that if you actually listened to "Master of Puppets" while on drugs, it might really mess you up. (Though I further suspect that it would depend on what you were on.) At more than eight minutes long, the thrash metal masterpiece posits drugs as the master and us as the puppets—in fact, the thing mimics the ever-repeating pattern of an addict. It kicks off with that memorable three-note descending riff and chugs ahead with the agitated, expectant feel of a junkie on the prowl, for smack or the money with which to buy it. At three or so minutes in arrives a beautiful, placid (by comparison) guitar solo—the pleasure of the high itself. Then we're back on the hunt. The numbness is gone and the "MASTER. MASTER." is in control yet again.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | gilbertcruz ## 'It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)' 
Toward the twilight of the 1980s, armed only with a bubblegum-pink tape deck and an increasingly threadbare cassette of R.E.M.’s fifth and final independent-label LP, Document, your young correspondent attempted to decipher all the lyrics to this exemplum of R.E.M.’s angular, corrosive High Reagan period. It’s a testament to the song’s lasting appeal — which includes its dance-party guitar riff, thrashing drums and cheerfully apocalyptic mind-set (first lines: “That’s great, it starts with an earthquake!”) — that “End of the World” has retained its air of mystery all these years. (“Representing seven games”? “Representatives engaged”? If only I still had that pink tape deck.) Consciously composed as a sped-up spoke-sung homage to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” the song has since cemented its legacy as a go-to headline whenever anything — including R.E.M. — comes to an amicable end.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Fight the Power' 
For more than two decades, "Fight the Power" has been an all-purpose rallying cry for people frustrated with abusive authority. Public Enemy's rappers Chuck D and Flavor Flav play the roles of preacher and clown, both of them burning with rage; nearly every line has become a catchphrase, from the song's antiestablishment refrain to its scalding dismissal of Elvis Presley. The Bomb Squad's instrumental track is the high point of hip-hop production: split-second shreds of more than a dozen songs, sampled, looped and layered into a dissonant, fractally precise mesh that sounds like a jukebox being firebombed. Named after a 1975 Isley Brothers funk record, "Fight the Power" first turned up in the unforgettable opening sequence of Spike Lee's movie Do the Right Thing. The song is built out of nonstop references and allusions to the history of black American culture and its relationship to the broader cultural landscape. (That tiny "aaah" at the beginning of the chorus, for instance, is all it needs to evoke Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff.")



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Pineola' 
“There's only a few things you can write about,” Lucinda Williams told New York magazine in 2005\. “Life, death, love, sex.” Williams, whom TIME named America’s best songwriter in 2001, excels at all four, but in death she has no equal. “Pineola,” recorded for her 1992 album Sweet Old World, is the story of a suicide precipitously close to Williams’ heart; the song captures that first wave of grief, the one that knocks you down and propels you out of mind and body. (“I think I must’ve picked up a handful of dust and let it fall over his grave,” she sings twice at the end—as if repeating it will make the memory true.) What makes “Pineola” great is Williams' hallmark bluesy toughness; the same teeth that snap in vengeful classics like “Changed the Locks” are gritted here in disbelief. Most songwriters would risk taking you to such depths of pain only if they planned to pull you back out. But most songwriters aren’t Lucinda Williams.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Sentimental Journey' 
All aboard for a nostalgia trip with Les Brown and his Band of Renown.



In the lilting fox-trot of the band's "Sentimental Journey" — and in Arthur Green's swinging sen-tuh-men-tul phrasing — you can almost see the locomotive wheels chugging, hear the steam spurting from the smokestack and feel the second-class coach swaying back and forth as the train makes its way down the tracks. And when it leaves at "seven," the high note mimics the train whistle and you're "waitin' up for heaven." As performed by a 20-year-old Doris Day, whose voice is honey with a dash of pepper, you want to pack your bag and join her on that journey home.



And that's exactly what many GIs were hoping to do when "Sentimental Journey" came out in 1944\. The song's aching nostalgia struck a chord in a nation welcoming its boys back from the front lines. If any song could make your heart "yearny" for the old hometown, this little train could. | jb1271 ## 'Minnie the Moocher' 
Cab Calloway was known as the Hi-De-Ho man, and "Minnie the Moocher" was his signature song. Written with impresario Irving Mills in 1931, the record sold more than a million copies and launched Calloway's group on a decade-long supercareer, breaking audience records for an all-black band.



Tuxedo clad and dancing a proto-moonwalk, Calloway spins his tale about Minnie, a rough and tough "frail" (perhaps the only use of that word as a noun in any song) who falls for drugged-out Smokey. He shows her how to "pass the gong around," a euphemism for sharing an opium pipe. "Poor Min, poor Min, poor Min," Calloway laments at the end. Her whale-size heart couldn't keep her out of trouble.



The song is best remembered less for the story than for Calloway's call and response — the "hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-hi!" that audiences repeat — with Calloway's scat getting ever jazzier and complex until the responders can't hope to keep up. Yes, Calloway was clownish, but he was a legendary musician with one of the swing era's best bands. "Minnie" put them on the map. | timeadmin ## 'Cheek to Cheek' 
Irving Berlin, the Russian Jewish émigré who couldn't write music, dreamed up a song for Fred Astaire, the skinny dancer who looked like Stan Laurel. Result: heaven. Most of the top songwriters of the period — Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen — loved working with Astaire for his debonair touch with a song and because their tunes inspired dance numbers, usually with Ginger Rogers, that are among the most powerful expressions of courtship, love and loss in screen history. But Berlin was the first among equals. All 13 songs that he composed for Astaire movies landed in the pop charts' Top 15\. Three went to No. 1, including this sublime ballad.



For the big dance duet from Top Hat, in which the tuxedoed Fred declares his love for Ginger in a feathery white gown, Berlin devised a dance-and-romance tune with an ambitious 64-bar structure. He also smartly pitched it to Astaire's frail-but-convincing tenor; for example, in the line "And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak," the melody zigzags up to a note Astaire can hardly sing. The number's daring swings of rhythm and emotion express three moods of a lover in pursuit — bliss ("Heaven, I'm in heaven"), jauntiness ("Oh, I love to climb a mountain") and desperate ardor ("Dance with me!") — which Astaire's dance of seduction with Rogers sublimely dramatizes. It's a miraculous piece of music, and Berlin wrote it all in a day. | timeadmin ## 'Star Dust' 
Composer Hoagy Carmichael wrote a tune that is the bane of all piano teachers: "Heart and Soul," a gateway to the keyboard, with a melody that can be played with one finger. Amateurs will have a much harder time plucking out the melody to Carmichael's "Star Dust," perhaps the least hummable tune on this list. But that's part of its charm. The melody doesn't conform to the typical structure for pop songs of the time. It rarely repeats a note, and it lands in places your head wouldn't normally go, but your heart gravitates toward it without hesitation.



Carmichael studied to be a lawyer at Indiana University, where he met jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke. The melody for "Star Dust" emerged from an improv session with Beiderbecke. For a few years after its first recording, in 1927, the piece was a jaunty and danceable instrumental song. But a 1931 version, slowed to a dreamy ballad with words by Mitchell Parish, is the one that went on to be one of the most recorded pop tunes in history, with more than a thousand versions that cross genres and styles.



In its most famous recording — a rendition by the great Louis Armstrong — we get both the instrumental treat, with Satchmo's signature trumpet on the intro, and the stargazing reverie of the vocals. As he sings, Armstrong dispenses with much of the melody, improvising in his distinctive style and finally repeating "Oh memory, oh memory" before belting out another trumpet solo, finding his own inspiration "in the stardust of a song." | timeadmin ## 'Where or When' 
It was a show about kids who had no more burning desire than to put on a show in a barn, and it stocked its cast with some splendid young comers: Alfred Drake, Dan Dailey and the Nicholas Brothers. Yet Babes in Arms, the 1937 Broadway hit with book and songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, boasted some of the team's most mature musical settings: the brassy "The Lady Is a Tramp," the poignant "My Funny Valentine" and this ballad, the all-time déjà vu song. Originally performed by Mitzi Green and Ray Heatherton, it became a No. 1 song for the Hal Kemp Orchestra in 1937 and was covered by everyone from Duke Ellington to Dave Brubeck, from Dion and the Belmonts (No. 3 on the Billboard chart in 1960) to Rod Stewart. At the 1999 Encores! revival of Babes in Arms, when the orchestra struck up the tune before the second act, the audience of 2,500 instantly started humming along.



Of all the sublime Rodgers and Hart songs, why does this one lodge so deeply in the popular soul? Because it conjures a state of wistful ecstasy that merges past and present, the dreamer and the dream, the lover and all his real or imagined loves. "Some things that happen for the first time/ Seem to be happening again." The somnambulistic sweetness of Rodgers' melody spurred Hart into almost sci-fi speculation. "And so it seems that we have met before/ And laughed before/ And loved before": the notes ascend toward an Everest of fulfillment, only to tumble into the question, "But who knows where or when?" The dreamer has awoken, with only the residue of rapture. | timeadmin ## 'Over the Rainbow' 
It's often considered the greatest movie song of all time, but it almost didn't make it into the final cut. When The Wizard of Oz was in previews, MGM thought the opening Kansas sequence was too long and that the song slowed the film down. Later, after making it into the film, "Over the Rainbow" won an Academy Award for Best Song. The tune itself is pop perfection. At just over two minutes, its lilting, free-floating melody and uplifting orchestral backing perfectly evoke Dorothy's hopes of leaving the only home she's known. The song has been covered countless times, and for years, the original movie version wasn't even the most popular one. But eventually Garland's delicate, hopeful vocal performance became the version capable of making even grown men tear up. | timeadmin ## 'Baby, It's Cold Outside' 
At Hollywood parties, Frank Loesser would amuse guests with this comic parry of seduction and resistance. Loesser would sing the "wolf" part, his wife Lynn the "mouse," in a dialogue of a woman trying to slip out of the bachelor's lair while he plies her with compliments and admonitions about the weather. "The neighbors might think… / But, baby, it's bad out there. / Say, what's in this drink? / No cabs to be had out there. / I wish I knew how—/ Your eyes are like starlight now. / —To break the spell. / I'll take your hat, your hair looks swell." A novelty song that still sounds contemporary, "Baby" was put on film in MGM's Neptune's Daughter. Four different interpretations scaled the pop top 20 in 1949, including this bantering delight by Ella and jump-blues bandleader Louis Jordan. Ever since, "Baby" has united all manner of musical odd couples: Bette Midler and James Caan, Dolly Parton and Rod Stewart, Glee's boy duo Chris Coffer and Darren Criss and, on The Muppet Show, Rudolf Nurejev (as the mouse) and Miss Piggy (as the wolf).



Fitzgerald's unparalleled genius, though, was as a balladeer who seamlessly fused jazz and pop, airy scat-singing and the subtlest line-readings. Whereas Billie Holiday made her art about the singer, not the song, Ella slipped inside every lyric and located its sweet or desperate truth. Her eight-album "song book" series, devoted to the works of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer, is an unparalleled achievement: an epic fusing of creator and interpreter. "I never knew how good our songs were," Ira Gershwin famously said, "until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them." | timeadmin ## 'It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)' 
Call him Duke Elegant, the Duke of Ellington or “Sir Duke” (in Stevie Wonder’s 1976 tribute song): Edward Kennedy Ellington was one swingin’ gent. Exploring, ennobling and fusing a dozen forms of American music, he composed suites, symphonies, Broadway and Hollywood scores. But no number was more infectious than this jazz anthem, its title taken from a comment by Ellington trumpeter player Bubber Miley (who died, at 29, the year the song came out). The opening descending phrase, evoking a dude’s strutting down marble steps, is instantly elaborated by vocalist Ivie Anderson: “Wah dot doo, wah dot doo, wah dot doo, dot dot doo, dah dah doo.” Her expert impersonation of a cooing trombone is taken up by Joe Nanton in the first chorus. “It makes no difference if it’s sweet or hot,” Anderson instructs. “Just keep that rhythm, give it everything you've got.” Then the piece goes riotous: trombones growl under Johnny Hodges’ magnificently meandering solo and, the next time around on her vocal, Ivie scats the bridge. The whole composition is a lesson in Afro-musicianship for the pop audience.



Beginning with his 1927-32 tenure as band leader at the Cotton Club and continuing for a fertile half-century, Ellington operated from an intellectual aerie he hoped would filter down to the mass audience. “We write and play from our perspective,” he said, “and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.” As fortunate as he was gifted, Ellington composed and played many top-10 hits—“Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Saddest Tale,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”—and formed an adventurous writing partnership with Billy Strayhorn (“Take the A Train”). The most laurelled of black composers, Ellington was honored on his 70th birthday with a dinner and jam session at the White House. “In the royalty of American music,” proclaimed the eminent jazz scholar Richard Nixon, “no man swings more or stands higher than the Duke.” | rcorliss ## 'Immigrant Song' 
You wouldn't guess it from the galloping beat and banshee scream that open "Immigrant Song," but Led Zeppelin was a blues band at its core — the most audacious of the generation of British rockers who devoured 40-year-old American music, cranked it up high and hard, welded titanium riffs onto it and brought it back home. But they were also fantasists, fascinated with sword-and-sorcery tales and misty old legends, and they single-handedly made Viking mythology sexier than it had been in a few hundred years.



Zep were famous for their extended, trippy jams and solos, but what's miraculous about "Immigrant Song" is its concision and groove. Guitar god Jimmy Page restricts himself to a handful of airtight riffs and tone bursts, and drummer John Bonham wields his sticks like they're hammers of gods. And then there's that title: this is ultimately a song about the way culture gets from one place to another — sometimes by mutual attraction, sometimes by force.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Superstition' 
Thirteen years old when he had his first No. 1 hit ("Fingertips — Part 2"), Stevie Wonder initially followed in the footsteps of another brilliant, blind R&B singer-keyboardist, Ray Charles. It wasn't long, though, before he revealed his gift for playing pretty much everything; once he made a landmark agreement with Motown Records to have total creative control of his work, he released a series of wildly original records.



"Superstition" is one of Wonder's signature songs — he played everything on the recording except the horns. True to his habit of assessing the entire culture around him, the lyrics double as a commentary on the political climate of the time. Where Motown would once have overdubbed sweeping strings, he builds a groove from layer upon layer of keyboards. Each instrument seems to be arguing with the others, and Wonder's voice ripples across them all like he's rendering judgment.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'September Gurls' 
Alex Chilton had the classic slow-build pop-career arc in reverse: having scored a massive hit ("The Letter") at the beginning of his career as the Box Tops' teenage singer, he spent the remaining four decades of his life supported by a small cult of fans making increasingly eccentric records. His artistic peak, though, came with Big Star, the early-'70s band that exemplified power pop's ideal of stringing together crystalline guitar hooks and creamy harmonies in the context of profound emotional darkness. Commercial flops in their day, Big Star's records became hugely influential for rock bands a generation later. "September Gurls" is the group's high point, an oblique but thrilling evocation of romantic ache. What are "September girls" and "December boys"? Chilton shows us the answer, rather than telling us — he articulates every spiky, tingling guitar note he plays and pushes his voice so high, it trembles. | timeadmin ## 'Juicy' 
“Juicy” is Biggie’s mythologized version of his autobiography. It starts with a dedication to his schoolteachers, but instead of thanking them, the rapper throws out a big “F--- you” for saying he’d never amount to anything. Then he launches into his life story, starting with the line, “It was all a dream,” and ending with “It’s all good.” “Juicy” follows Biggie’s career trajectory from having nothing but a can of sardines to eat for dinner to “lunches, brunches” and putting 5-carat earrings in his daughter’s ear. “We used to fuss when the landlord dissed us/ No heat, wonder why Christmas missed us,” he raps, so smoothly that it sounds like a conversation. Biggie talks about money and drugs, but “Juicy” contains no braggadocio, no empty boasts. This is a straight-up, honest song by a man amazed by his own wealth and fame.



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| timeadmin ## 'California Love \[Remix\]' 
This song is ostensibly about one thing, and that one thing is there in the very first line. "California. Knows how to party." But it's also about 2Pac's return to the rap scene after his time in prison, a salvo of West Coast love against his East Coast rivals. 2Pac died young and famous and was thus granted with a posthumous solemnity at odds with the fun-loving rapper we experience in songs like "I Get Around," "How Do You Want It" and "California Love." This is why he was so popular, because he put together bangin' songs like this, the ones you want to hear loud in a club or while driving in a car with amazing bass or as soon as you walk through the door into a party.



The backbone of the song is an infectious seven-note sample taken from an Ultramagnetic MCs song (which took it from Joe Cocker's "Woman to Woman"). On top of that is funk singer Roger Troutman and early echoes of Auto-Tune, as he sings the chorus through the distorted talkbox he was known for. On All Eyez on Me —considered to be hip-hop's first real double album — 2Pac includes a remix version of "California Love" that is more chill, more laid back, more California. The original, the better song, is urgent and hot and mind-erasing. By the end, you're just as exhausted as the person who comes in at the four-and-a-half minute mark, panting heavily. There's no thinking when you hear this song: there is only dancing and rapping along.



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| timeadmin ## 'Common People' 
Class warfare is the meme of 2011-era America, but the sly Britpop band Pulp waged it in high style back in 1995 with Different Class, which fused disco, postpunk and electronica to exact a ferociously danceable vengeance of the have-nots. Lead singer and lyricist Jarvis Cocker even showed prescience about future casualties of the global banking crisis by casting a wealthy girl from Greece — one who “wants to live like common people” — as the object of his disaffection. A thrilling j’accuse, “Common People” airs out the stink of condescending classism pervading not only the minds of affluent exchange students but also popular depictions of British working-class life. “Everybody hates a tourist,” Cocker says in the song’s climactic third verse. “Especially one who thinks it’s all such a laugh — yeah, and the chip stains and grease will come out in the bath.” If Cocker had never written another lyric after “Common People,” he’d still be a folk hero in England.



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| timeadmin ## 'Hey Ya!' 
Have the lyrics to “Hey Ya!” ever heard the music? Has the music read the lyrics? Written, produced and performed by André 3000 for Outkast’s double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, the song is a popcorn popper of musical styles—everything from shades of British Invasion pop to Prince-crowned funkadelics—built on a simple and sturdy drumbeat, sweetly skipping synth lines and a burbling bass part (plus droplets of watery, guitarish synth that streak into the mix partway through). Incongruously, the words—delivered alternately as karaoke testimonial and lonely falsetto croon—come from a man dismayed and frustrated, asking a romantic interest why “\[we’re\] so in denial when we know we’re not happy here.” But by the time André gets to shaking it like a Polaroid picture, happiness hardly matters, because “Hey Ya!” is resolved to dance the sad away.



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| timeadmin ## '99 Problems' 
This Rick Rubin–produced track takes an old Ice-T chorus (from T’s 1993 song of the same name), mixes it with some earsplitting guitar riffs and stars Jay-Z spitting some of his hardest, edgiest raps in years. Hova goes off on rap critics, racial profiling and violence. (Apparently sexism, or at least the word 'bitch,' doesn't bother him.) The song’s strongest message is conveyed in its second verse, when Jay-Z relays a story about being pulled over by the cops: “I heard, ‘Son, do you know why I’m stoppin’ you for?’ ” he raps. “ ’Cause I'm young and I'm black and my hat’s real low?” But the story isn’t just about racism; the driver of the car actually has drugs in the trunk. Nobody, not even Jay-Z, is innocent in “99 Problems.”



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| timeadmin ## 'Gold Digger' (featuring Jamie Foxx) 
In most hip-hop songs, wealth is coveted and women are mistreated. It’s the “Thug ’em, f--- ’em, love ’em, leave ’em” mentality, to borrow a line from Jay-Z. So it’s unusual for one of music’s kingpins to admit he’s been suckered by a woman—much less write an upbeat song about it. “Gold Digger” is lighthearted Kanye at his best: his lyrics are funny (“She was supposed to buy your shorty Tyco with your money/ \[Instead\] she went to the doctor \[and\] got lipo with your money”) and the beat is undeniably catchy. The song’s backbone is a mixture of scratches, loops and handclaps set to follow the lyrics’ cadence. Instead of sampling Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman” directly, Kanye employs the talents of Jamie Foxx, who had starred in Ray a year earlier, to sing the part. But just when you think “Gold Digger” is nothing more than an danceable screed against money-grubbing women, Kanye throws in a story about a poor black woman who stands by her man only to see him get rich and dump her for a white girl. Everybody gets played.



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| timeadmin ## 'All My Friends' 
How it starts: a percussive, Steve Reich–haunted piano line, banged out over and over. Then one layer and then another—an echoing sixteenth-beat drum part (grafted from the Joy Division playbook), a keening guitar strand, James Murphy’s voice building to an anxious shout. The song is all urgency and slow-burning panic. You’re not sure how to put this urgency into words, and neither is the song, but both of you know exactly what this feels like: it feels like the lost intensity of early-20s friendships, dissipated by jobs and mates and kids; it feels like the lost promise of a fabled carefree youth that you know looks beautiful only from afar; it feels like you’ve lost the person you imagined you’d be and wasted the person you were; and it feels like—and this is where the moral kicks in, and the hope, and maybe the drugs—you still have time to make it up, start a new plan, accept, reverse course or whatever you need to do to become what you are, and you can do it, but you just have to answer this one question: Where are your friends tonight?



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| timeadmin ## 'Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)' 
As simple as a double-dutch chant and as complicated as half a decade of psychotherapy, “Single Ladies” encapsulates the lessons pop songs have picked up from hip-hop: that a great beat and a great voice can carry a lot of weight, that a slightly sour sound (the little electronic swoop that keeps tugging at the song’s fringe) can make everything else sweeter, that looping your audience into a hook is a great idea.



By the time “Single Ladies” appeared, Beyoncé Knowles was already 10 years into her stardom, first achieved with Destiny’s Child, then as a solo artist. Her public persona crystallized a long time ago—she’s the voice of women who won’t settle for less than the best—and the song fits neatly into that premise (and sets up its scenario with ingenious concision). It's a sing-along that lets Beyoncé show off her virtuosity, a focused, commanding display of individuality that speaks for every raised hand without a ring on it.



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| timeadmin ## 'Bad Romance' 
Aren’t pop stars supposed to be sweet? Britney, Christina and Katy just wanted to love and be loved by you. Even Madonna’s early work was largely about thanking her lucky stars and wanting to dress you up in her love. But Gaga doesn’t want any of that. On the lead single from her second album, The Fame Monster, she pines for a destructive relationship that she knows will end in disaster. (Or, according to the music video, a singed bed and a corpse. Either/or.) She will play mind games. She will use you. “Bad Romance” is an infectiously catchy dance song about all of the crazy, messed-up feelings people have for one another.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\]

| timeadmin ## 'Stormy Weather' 
For American pop music in the first half of the 20th century, the core collaboration was between Jewish songwriters and black singers and styles. In the early '30s at Harlem's Cotton Club, where African-Americans could star on stage but not sit in the audience, Harold Arlen (a cantor's son) and Ted Koehler wrote a string of hits: "I've Got the World on a String," "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" and this bluesy perennial. One of countless songs that impart meteorological metaphors to emotions — here it "keeps rainin' all the time" in the singer's heart — "Stormy Weather" establishes its personality with its first three mournful notes: "Don't know why..." For the bridge ("When she went away, the blues walked in and met me…"), Arlen switches to the slow stomping of a New Orleans funeral march that ascends to a plangent phrase reminiscent of Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home." Summarizing a century of pop music, the song sounds fresh and poignant in this century as well.



Ethel Waters, who introduced the song, took it to No. 1 in 1933, when versions by Duke Ellington, Guy Lombardo and Ted Lewis also made the top 10\. But "Stormy Weather" is inextricably linked to Lena Horne, who performed it in the 1943 film of the same name. Horne had joined the Cotton Club chorus at 16; her keen beauty, soprano lilt and silky poise would have made her a Hollywood star if the industry hadn't been so profoundly racist. Like Paul Robeson with "Ol' Man River," Horne made her signature song an autobiographical statement. Performing into her eighties, she remained a beacon for black performers, a divinity to audiences of all colors and a lingering, stinging reproach to the attitudes that had robbed her of her Hollywood prime. | timeadmin ## 'Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy' 
When "a famous trumpet man from out Chicago way" got drafted into the Army and was made a bugler, "It really brought him down because he could not jam." So the captain "went out and drafted a band." Now that the bugle boy has his sidemen, "the company jumps when he plays reveille. / He's the boogie woogie bugle boy of Company B." The happiest, heppest World War II song, written by Don Raye and Hughie Prince, actually predated Pearl Harbor by almost a year: the Andrews Sisters performed it in the Jan. 1941 Abbott and Costello comedy Buck Privates, the year's biggest movie hit. The song's message — that the U.S. Army would welcome all comers and let them do their own thing — survived the war by decades. A hit again for Bette Midler in 1973, "Bugle Boy" also inspired Christina Aguilera's naughty-nostalgic "Candyman" in 2007.



From Minnesota, Patty, Maxene and Laverne Andrews based their early style on the close harmonizing of the Boswell Sisters, but even tighter and often with a jump beat. They had a No. 1 hit with the Yiddish tune "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" and found their ideal composer in Raye, who filled out their catalogue with jive novelties like "Scrub Me, Mama, With a Boogie Beat" and "Mister Five by Five." "Bugle Boy" was a near-duplicate to another Raye song for the trio, "Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar," about a Texas pianist "but the way he likes to play is eight to the bar." The sisters often served as Bing Crosby's backup group in both ballads and novelty songs. To the crooner, they were the three-headed musical equivalent of Bob Hope: Bing's foil and equals. And like Hope they were tireless entertainers of the troops overseas. The Sisters' comic verve sent messages of solidarity and cheer from the home front to the war front. | timeadmin ## 'It Had to Be You' 
So many love songs — particularly those penned during the Tin Pan Alley days — put love, and lovers, on a pedestal: all sweetness, light and perfection. But ain't nobody perfect. And if we're lucky, we find somebody who loves us and can't live without us, in spite of our faults.



That's what makes Gus Khan's words so refreshing in the 1924 song "It Had to Be You." Here is someone who is absolutely smitten in spite of the significant other's bossy and cranky nature. Married to Isham Jones' tune, with its surprising and sultry half-tone shift on the second mention of "you," the lyrics have been crooned by everyone from Marion Harris to Diane Keaton's Annie Hall. By the time Betty Hutton recorded "It Had to Be You" for the 1944 film Incendiary Blonde, it was fully entrenched as a standard, a romantic — and realistic — addition to the Great American Songbook. | timeadmin ## 'Der Fuehrer's Face' 
It takes real talent to be perfectly silly. Comic bandleader Spike Jones (not the Jonze with a z) and his City Slickers turned the big band on its head, playing truly zany parodies of well-known tunes. Jones colored the arrangements with slide whistles, bulb horns and other sound effects. In a Jones tune, there was rarely a need for more cowbell.



His big break came in 1942, when "Der Fuehrer's Face" hit the airwaves, poking fun at the Nazis at the height of World War II. Oliver Wallace wrote the song for a Disney project during a time when the studio was a major cog in the war-propaganda machine. Wallace arranged it as an oompah band opener for a Donald Duck cartoon, which put the unintelligible fowl in a nightmarish place called Nutsiland. Even as the Disney artists were inking and painting cels for the fever dream of a cartoon, Jones and band released their version, giving the Germans the old Bronx cheer with an instrument he called the birdaphone. It was a major radio hit.



The cartoon — filled with caricatures of Axis power figures and effeminate jokes that wouldn't pass in our politically correct times — came out in 1943 and replaced the birdaphone rasps with bleats of tuba. It went on to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Short (the only win for a Donald Duck cartoon). But it was the Jones version that soldiers would sing to boost morale, blowing raspberries right in der Führer's face. | timeadmin ## 'Where Did Our Love Go?' 
Motown's slogan was "The sound of young America," and its inclusiveness was deliberate: its greatest records of the '60s didn't just cross over between black and white audiences but brought them together. "Where Did Our Love Go?" was a creative leap for two trios — one of women, one of men. The songwriting-production team of Lamont Dozier and Brian and Eddie Holland originally wrote it for the Marvelettes, who turned it down; instead, it ended up in the hands of another girl group, the Supremes, who had been pounding the boards for five years with little success.



"Where Did Our Love Go?" was pitched too low for Diana Ross to sing comfortably, but that gave her lead vocal the murmuring reserve that makes the song so affecting. And Holland-Dozier-Holland's arrangement — whose foot stomps, by a kid who lived in Motown's Detroit neighborhood, set the pace for millions of young American dancers — is so light and precise that it seems to hover in midair.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)' 
A lot of remarkable singers came up through the Baptist Church, and Aretha Franklin, whose father was the famous-in-his-day Rev. C.L. Franklin, was one of them. For a gospel singer to transition to secular music was no small matter in those days, and Franklin didn't have much success with it at first: she was a fairly minor pop singer for the better part of the '60s. The session that produced "I Never Loved a Man" was the turning point in her career. For the first time, she got to simply play piano and sing the way she'd grown up singing, backed by a first-rate soul band (the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section). It's an earthshaking, hair-raising performance, with an unprecedented honesty about eros — and the song's sly subtext is that it could also be addressed to God. Finally unleashed, Franklin's mighty voice went on to dominate R&B for years. It's still the gold standard of soul singing.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' 
It starts ominously, with a single drum shot followed by a dangerous-sounding electric-piano riff and a portentous tambourine rattle. The song creeps up on us, and its instrumentation — from the swirling, stabbing strings to the jittery piano on the fade-out — tells us all we need to know about the situation. The world is not to be trusted. This man has found out that he's being played by his woman, and he is totally messed up about it.



One of the most successful songs ever put out by Motown, "Grapevine" was initially rejected several times by CEO Berry Gordy, who disliked it for some unfathomable reason. And when he did finally allow the tune through, he gave it to Gladys Knight and the Pips, who delivered a fun, upbeat hit. But it was Gaye's lovelorn version, taped one year before, that became the all-timer, allowing the singer to start his drift away from the hemmed-in Motown hit machine toward the type of songwriting freedom that characterized What's Going On. Here, he simply delivers one of the coolest songs ever about getting cheated on.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' 
"Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train," says the narrator of this uncanny attempt by a mostly Canadian rock band to conjure a perfect folk-ballad simulacrum of sepia-toned Americana. The lament of a Confederate soldier standing in the ruins of the starving American South, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" is made to sing around the campfire, high-lonesome harmonies and all. It became an unlikely hit for Joan Baez and reached immortality with a brass-backed version in the Martin Scorsese documentary The Last Waltz. The latter rendition is slightly disfigured by Robbie Robertson's grandstanding and fake-singing, since "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" belongs to the group's only Southerner, singer-drummer Levon Helm, who gave the Band its dirt-swept voice and this song its broken heartbeat.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Ball 'n' Chain' 
Like Erma Franklin, Arthur Crudup and other black musicians working in the rhythm and blues scene right before rock 'n' roll took off, Big Mama Thornton saw her songs re-recorded by white musicians and turned into chart-topping hits. Before Elvis recorded "Hound Dog," there was Big Mama's version. And before Janis Joplin recorded "Ball 'n' Chain," there was Big Mama's version. On this song, about being dragged down by a burdensome love, she comes across as a darker, more downtrodden version of Aretha Franklin, with a deep, soulful voice that she could twist and turn and run raw with emotion.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'I Want You Back' 
Talk about charging out of the gate: the first nationally distributed single by the Jackson 5 would turn out to be their first of four consecutive No. 1 hits. It's an immaculate machine of a song, propelled into orbit by the leaping voice of Michael Jackson, a 10-year-old singing about an emotional experience he could not possibly have had. Showbiz is all about that kind of glorious lie, though, and from his very first shout here, what drove Jackson was his unflagging desire to be the greatest entertainer there was.



As was often the case with Motown's best records, there was some backroom intrigue involved in this song's creation. The Holland-Dozier-Holland writing-production team had left the label a few years earlier; in its place, Motown boss Berry Gordy assembled a new group, billed simply as "the Corporation." They tinkered with the song (originally called "I Wanna Be Free"), including its arrangement (featuring a couple of members of the Jazz Crusaders) and Jackson's performance, until it was chiseled and polished into this starmaking jewel.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Gimme Shelter' 
The Rolling Stones had a reputation as the great cynics of rock 'n' roll, the band that flipped over the peace-and-love bromides of the '60s to expose the nasty side of power and sex. "Gimme Shelter" is where they proved it: its title is a demand, not a request. Released as the decade was collapsing under the weight of its violence and broken promises, the song builds from Keith Richards' prickling, sky-darkening guitar introduction to a cascade of horror. Mick Jagger sings with an air of snarling condescension: "War, children — it's just a shot away." Every few seconds, the band ratchets up the tension; every blues trope they toss into the mix makes the song that much more unnerving. What pushes it over the top, though, is guest singer Merry Clayton, who wails along with Jagger as if she's sending a warning, then briefly takes over the song to howl about rape and murder before Jagger rejoins her to pretend that the whole thing was nothing more than a seduction.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes' 
The title is, of course, a play on words. But it's also accurate. Stephen Stills wrote the four-part medley about his impending breakup with Judy Collins, a well-known singer at the time. As the story goes, the all-star band Crosby, Stills and Nash was founded by Stills (then part of Buffalo Springfield), David Crosby (the Byrds) and Graham Nash (the Hollies) at either the home of Joni Mitchell or Mama Cass Elliot (the answer depends on which band member you're talking to) when they started harmonizing together, most likely to this very song. "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" opened their first self-titled album in 1969\. The roughly three-minute-long first movement could be a self-sufficient pop song in its own right. But it keeps building for close to seven minutes — first to a section of Stills' vocal solos and finally to the "doo doo doo" coda and tight three-part harmonies that have come to define CSN (and sometimes Y). And though Stills played the song personally for Collins, it couldn't repair the relationship. But out of that breakup, we got an incredible trio and one of pop music's great long tracks.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Rock & Roll' 
It takes gumption to give a song a title as declarative as "Rock & Roll," but Lou Reed could hardly contain his excitement for his subject, young Jenny, whose "life is saved by rock and roll." In this loose-limbed, three-chords-and-a-cloud-of-feedback track, Reed's voice runs up and down and all around the melody: "One fine mornin' she puts on a New York station/ She doesn't believe what she heard at all." Building up to an ecstatic frenzy of "It's all right now's," the song encapsulates the creation myth of rock 'n' roll fans trapped in backwater towns until they happen upon something mind-blowing from a big city that cracks the whole world open. Ramshackle and fiercely ambitious at once, "Rock & Roll" fulfills its own dare: this must have been the song Jenny heard on the radio.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Get Up (I Feel like Being a) Sex Machine' 
By 1970, James Brown had already been a star several times over — he'd had his first hit with "Please, Please, Please" in 1956, become the biggest live attraction in R&B by the early '60s and invented funk with "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" and "Cold Sweat." His razor-sharp band responded to his impulses instantly. When they quit en masse before a show that March, he flew in a bunch of awkward teenagers, hit the stage with them (a couple of hours late) and shaped them into the even tighter band that would record this indelible groove six weeks later.



As with a lot of Soul Brother No. 1's hits, "Sex Machine" was half-improvised with the tape rolling. Engineer Ron Lenhoff got co-writing credit as thanks for driving five hours to the recording studio in the middle of the night to capture the newly written jam. The band is the machine, locking into an impossibly taut rhythm, while Brown provides the sex, with longtime collaborator Bobby Byrd as his wingman chanting "Get on up!" at him.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Iron Man' 
The alarming, dissonant guitar groan that kicks off "Iron Man," eventually cohering into a primal five-note riff, struck lead singer Ozzy Osbourne as evoking "a big iron bloke walking about." So it's all the more surprising that Black Sabbath apparently had neither the Marvel comic hero nor Ted Hughes' Iron Giant in mind when they pounded together this foundational slab of heavy metal, about a time-traveling seer who turns to steel and plots revenge. Even today, "Iron Man" seems pulled from ancient wreckage — an industrial artifact of the rubble-strewn steel towns of the English Midlands that stood in stark, sooty contrast to sunnier '70s hard rock. (Fun fact: Ozzy couldn't come up with a melody, so he just sang along with the guitar.)



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'A Case of You' 
You can hear the melancholy in the first pluckings of the dulcimer:



Just before our love got lost, you said/ "I am as constant as a northern star"/ And I said, "Constantly in the darkness/ Where's that at?/ If you want me, I'll be in the bar"



Throw Joni Mitchell a platitude about love and she'll catch it, sidearm it back at you, then spin around and order a whiskey. The genius of "A Case of You," the quintessential after-the-fact love song, is that Mitchell understands we have to feel the love enough to mourn its passing. Fallout swirls all around: the things the lover said, the things the mutual friend said about him — all the words that the brokenhearted can't get out of their heads, made razor-sharp and beautiful. But the real lyrical coup de grâce comes in the chorus: "Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine/ You taste so bitter and so sweet/ Oh, I could drink a case of you/ And still I'd be on my feet." That's love bottled up in a single metaphor: sacred, toxic and dangerously addictive but gloriously, painfully endurable. "A Case of You" is about enduring, and like the love it describes, it touches souls.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Baba O’Riley' 
Depending on the way you approach it, the opening track on the 1971 album Who's Next by the Who can appear to be very complicated or startlingly simple. First, the complicated: Pete Townshend wrote "Baba O'Riley" as part of a rock opera called Lifehouse that he never completed. He wanted to take the ideas of the Indian spiritual guru Meher Baba and somehow translate them into music — specifically, the kind of repetitive, modal sounds produced by minimalist composer Terry Riley. The result was a frenzied, computerized-sounding pattern that Townshend played on a Lowrey organ. He named the resulting tune "Baba O'Riley" in deference to his idols. Toward the end of the five-minute track, guest musician Dave Arbus (of the band East of Eden) breaks in with a violin solo and suddenly the distinctly modern song switches into what can only be described as an Irish romp.



The simpler explanation: the Who have written a beautiful ode to that painful, lost feeling known as adolescence. Or, as they put it, the teenage wasteland.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Jolene' 
Who knew Dolly Parton could ever feel threatened by another woman? She wrote this plea to a cheating man's mistress after watching her real-life husband flirt with a bank teller (harmlessly, it seems). "Your smile is like a breath of spring," she sings. "Your voice is soft like summer rain/ And I cannot compete with you, Jolene." Released as a single in 1973, "Jolene" shot to the top of the country charts and also became a modest crossover hit. Unlike most songs about no-good, cheatin' spouses, this one is neither angry nor resentful. There's no accusation, no vow to enact revenge. It's about two women: the mistress who has the trump card and the fragile wife who is begging her not to play it.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' 
In 1991, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna wrote “Kurt Smells like Teen Spirit” on her friend Kurt Cobain’s bedroom wall. (Teen Spirit was a type of deodorant marketed to young girls.) Cobain took the joke and turned it into an anthem for the “over-bored and self-assured” youth who failed to connect with mainstream culture. “Teen Spirit” was recorded in just three takes, and although it was released as the first single off the band’s Nevermind album, it wasn’t expect to sell. But surprisingly, it did. The song’s music video was played constantly on MTV, and Nevermind went on to sell 25 million copies. The song is arguably one of the biggest hits of the 1990s, but if you listen to it today, with Kurt’s garbled lyrics over muddled guitar riffs, it sounds just as raw and revolutionary as it did 20 years ago. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” isn’t a song for the grunge generation. It’s a song for anyone who has ever stopped and realized, “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.”



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\]

| timeadmin ## 'Wake Up' 
The members of Arcade Fire write bold songs and record bold albums. They have something to say, and they want to say it audaciously. Check out “Wake Up,” from 2004’s Funeral. It begins with a simple, one-note, rhythmic guitar pattern that leads to every band member singing an all-encompassing vocal part in unison. It’s big, spacious and patient, with lead man Win Butler pleading for today’s kids to open their eyes. His vocals turn from beautiful melody to back-of-the-throat screaming that blends seamlessly into the rest of the members’ vocal line. But if you wait for it, “Wake Up” transforms into a dance number driven by a bouncy but still gloomy piano as Butler screams, “You better look out below!” It’s a truly sincere anthem for this seemingly unending age of irony.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\]

| timeadmin ## 'Crazy' 
She had all the makings of pop immortality: overnight stardom, singing "Walkin' After Midnight" on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts TV show, a string of pop and country hits ("She's Got You," "I Fall to Pieces" and the peerless heart crusher "Sweet Dreams"), a rowdy domestic life and the all-important early, violent death, in a plane crash when she was just 30\. But Patsy Cline also had the goods: this woman could sing. Her bold contralto caught the pain and truth of a lyric without ever getting histrionic. "Oh, Lord," she said, "I sing just like I hurt inside." The way she transformed hurt into art made Cline the Callas of country.



She got "Crazy" from the young songwriter Willie Nelson and turned it into a seamless intersection of pop and country. Supported by Floyd Cramer's tinkly piano and the unobtrusive harmonies of the Jordanaires, she poured her aches into the soul of a jilted lover who acts as her own shrink: "I'm crazy for tryin' and crazy for cryin'/ And I'm crazy for loving you." Singing like an angel with a broken heart, Cline would draw out a note until it was exhausted, then punctuate it with a catch in her throat that sounded like the small sob of a strong woman. It was literally that: she had broken ribs in a near fatal car accident and found pain in hitting the high notes. Suffering for her craft was just one thing that made Patsy Cline a pure country heroine.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Crying' 
It's said that when Roy Orbison, at one time a songwriter with little success as a singer, auditioned "Only the Lonely" for Colonel Tom Parker in hopes of getting Elvis Presley to perform it, the Colonel told Orbison that Presley could never reach the climactic high note ("Yoooooou've"), so he'd better record the song himself. Soon the gawky guy with dark glasses was "the Caruso of Rock" — actually, country pop — who, usually with co-writer Joe Melson, fashioned agonized or ecstatic arias uniquely suited to his reedy, three-octave range. Most songs presented a mood or an attitude; Orbison's were often melodramatic playlets. In "Oh, Pretty Woman," the singer spots a fine fox on the street and is about to give up on her when "what do I see?/ Is she walkin' back to me?/ Yeah, she's walkin' back to me." In "Running Scared," Orbison is afraid his woman will go back to an old lover who has just returned, until "you turned around and walked away with me" — the last phrase ascending into a triumphant, countertenor empyrean.



In the Orbison-Melson "Crying," the speaker analyzes his depression over a lost love and decides the condition is permanent. He was "all right for a while" until she showed up again, and a single act of nostalgic generosity — "You held my hand so tight" — triggered his tears. "I love you even more/ than I did before/ So darling, what can I do?" For two verses the song is measured, musically inventive and suspenseful. Will she walk back to Orbison, walk away with him? Not this time: "For you don't love me/ And I'll always be..." And finally comes the torrential title word, an impossible octave or two higher, registering the ecstasy of misery. It's both a bravura performance and a depressive-manic, wrenching-frightening one. If your heart doesn't break listening to "Crying," consult a physician; you may not have one.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Be My Baby' 
Bump, bump-bump, whack, bump, bump-bump, whack. Pounding like King Kong's heartbeat at the top of the Empire State Building, Hal Blaine's drum intro to "Be My Baby" signaled the anticipatory heat of teen rapture. Written by the young husband-wife team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich and performed by the Ronettes, with Veronica "Ronnie" Bennett as the imploring lead singer, "Be My Baby" represented the apogee of producer Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" singles with New York City girl groups. (Spector and Bennett were married from 1968 to 1974, decades before his murder conviction in 2009.) When Bennett pleads "So won't you be/ Be my, be my baby?," she makes erotic yearning seem almost sacred and maternal.



The Wall of Sound was a fuzzy, congested, massive sonic assault designed for 45-r.p.m. record players and AM car radios. Summoning an army of musicians — backup singers, guitarists, a few horn men, percussionists with their castanets, maracas and tambourines, plus three or four pianists banging away simultaneously and maybe a string section — to his cramped, beloved Gold Star studio in L.A., the producer would keep noodling and cajoling until he heard the magic that was already in his head. By the time he was done, the number exploded with a sound so dense and intense that a record needle could literally jump out of the grooves. Spector's target audience of adolescents got the same vinyl jolt. Even today, it's impossible to listen to "Da Doo Ron Ron," "He's a Rebel," "Then He Kissed Me," "Not to Young to Get Married" — or "Be My Baby" — without feeling elated, intoxicated and 15.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' 
Before "I Want to Hold Your Hand," the Beatles were a nifty little phenomenon, a scrappy quartet of Liverpool kids with a taste for American R&B and a fervent cult following. Then that thrilling, urgent opening riff erupted out of every transistor radio speaker it could reach, and all of a sudden they were the Beatles: the most important pop act in the world, the group that turned the declining rock 'n' roll fad into the sound of the future, the band that made girls scream, boys grow their hair and every other pop musician realize they had to step their game up in a hurry.



The miraculous part is that the Beatles stayed great for another six years, reshaping pop again and again. "I Want to Hold Your Hand," though, is the best example of how John Lennon and Paul McCartney's voices and songwriting gifts could intertwine so closely as to be inseparable. The Beatles' great subject, as they declared at the end of their partnership, was love; this is a song about falling in love that's as joyful as the feeling it describes.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'The Girl from Ipanema' 
Bossa nova, in Portuguese, literally means "the new thing," and the style that a group of Brazilian musicians including Jo\[t {a}\]o Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim developed in the '50s was at least a new hybrid — part samba, part jazz, deliciously complicated but meant to be played with a touch so light that it seemed easy.



When jazz saxophonist Stan Getz collaborated on an album with a few of the architects of the new Brazilian sound, Gilberto suggested that his wife Astrud — who had never sung professionally — try her hand at a couple of tunes. Her performance on the English translation of Jobim's tune "Garota de Ipanema" was as natural and quiet as breathing. It's the recording that brought bossa nova to an international audience; in the popular imagination, singer, song and style all blended into one another (it's a song about a girl who's like a song, set on the beach of Rio de Janeiro). Eventually, its airy chords became a symbol for its entire form, and for an outsider's romantic vision of sunny, faraway places.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Borderline' 
When “Borderline” was released as a single in February 1984 I was 11: not quite old enough to be in love with a boy, just the right age to fall in love with a pop song. We fell en masse, the girls in my Catholic middle school, and as much as we could look like Madonna — lacy bows, mousse-mussed hair, fingerless gloves — while still pulling off the uniform kilt, we did. (Maybe the kilt didn’t hurt, actually.) What was it about “Borderline” that hooked us? That slightly adenoidal, approachable voice; the look Madonna had in the video of a cool big sister crossing over into womanhood, deciding what kind of woman she wanted to be; the tantalizing frustration not just of being in love but of constantly having one’s love pushed over the borderline. Madonna went on to sing more-clever songs (“Material Girl”), more-showy songs (“Like a Prayer”), more-sexy songs (“Justify My Love”). But “Borderline,” her first top-10 hit, captures the essence of her pop appeal, its freshness, simplicity and vitality.



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | timeadmin ## 'Coal Miner's Daughter' 
Not all the protest music of the Vietnam era came from folk singers in Manhattan coffee houses. In Nashville, Loretta Lynn led a down-home feminist crusade against philandering husbands (“Don’t Come Home Cheatin’ With Lovin’ On Your Mind”), conniving mistresses (“You Ain’t Woman Enough”) and a government that turned wives into widows (“Dear Uncle Sam”). Some of these songs, like the birth-control-advocatin’ “The Pill,” got Lynn banned from country radio stations. But who could stay steamed at a pretty, borderline-brilliant singer-songwriter from the Kentucky hamlet of Butcher’s Holler?



Few of Lynn’s songs carried as much drama, deprivation and heartache as her own rags-to-riches saga: born the second of eight children in a poor rural family; married by 13 to 21-year-old Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn; enduring his infidelity for a decade before he gave her a guitar; blossoming into a singer-songwriter who used Doo’s misdeeds as her material. Chapter One of the saga is in her signature hit, which makes vivid musical pictures of Daddy’s job at the Van Lear Cal Mines, Mommy’s bleeding fingers at the washboard, the kids barefoot in summer and shod from a mail-order catalog in winter. So purely Appalachian that it rhymes “hard” and “tired,” “Coal Miner’s Daughter” spawned Lynn’s autobiography and the 1980 bio-pic, which earned Sissy Spacek an Oscar for Best Actress. At the end of the song, Lynn revisits the shack to find “Not much left but the floor, nothin’ Lives here anymore / ’Cept the memories of a coal miner’s daughter.”



\[nofeed\](Browse the All-TIME 100 Songs and more than 100 other pop culture lists on TIME's Populist iPad app)\[/nofeed\] | rcorliss ## 'I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)' 
The sibling Stax and Volt labels, based in Memphis, were the down-and-dirty answer to Motown Records, speaking unpasteurized truth with ragged authority. Sam and Dave, Carla Thomas and that nonpareil house band, Booker T. and the MG’s, were among the Stax-Volt stars, but Otis Redding was their prime minister, with a voice whose aching power suggested both preacher and sinner. Raised in Macon, Ga., and spurred into music by his admiration for local hero Little Richard, Redding packed decades of raw artistry—such Rushmores of yearning as “That’s How Strong My Life Is,” “Try a Little Tenderness” and “Respect”—into his four years on Volt before his death at 26 in a 1967 plane crash.



The title of his best song, written with Impressions front man Jerry Butler, sounds like the first phrase of a Dear John letter—the prelude to a kiss-off. But it’s really a declaration of dependency: “I’ve been loving you too long to stop now.” The woman in a veteran couple is restless and ready to move on, so the singer engages in pleas, threats and mournfully acute observations: “My love is growing stronger as our affair grows old.” That the song could also be about heroin (“You become a habit to me”) cements the similarity of Redding’s lament to Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”: both say that passion is a dangerous drug that the addict doesn’t want to be cured of. Wailing this waltz played in funeral tempo, and backed by a horn section blaring long, mournful notes like a monotone ambulance siren, Redding piles up the agitation until he’s screaming for validation, for pity, for any sign that a lover will be able to sustain the torture he craves.



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